Friday, December 30, 2011

My review of "From the Fever-World" up at the Rattle website

A quick note to say that my review of Jehanne Dubrow’s From the Fever-World should be up at the Rattle website here today. I've been increasingly impressed with Dubrow's talent with each book of poems that she publishes; it was fascinating to revisit her earlier work.

I just finished Ann Patchett's State of Wonder. I both loved it and found it tedious. It's beautiful and lush and filled with poetic description. I also found myself sinking into a sort of tropical torpor as I picked up the book each time to continue slogging through it. Book as dense jungle--if I had to write a pithy description, there it would be.

And then, suddenly, the end arrives, like a hurricane. I won't soon stop thinking about it and puzzling over it. I'm kind of annoyed with the ending, frankly, and I find myself saying that more and more often in the past year. Some would say it's out of frustration that I'm not writing books myself, but I don't think that's it. I'm noticing books that I'm reading that don't quite deserve the endings that they have: they haven't earned them or they come to suddenly or they make no sense or the book just comes crashing to a halt. More on that later, perhaps.

2 comments:

Also, I am fascinated by this unsatisfactory-endings thing, so I look forward to you blogging more on that. I just read a short story that gripped me from the start, and then failed to follow through on the expectations it had aroused.

Follow by Email

About Me

A poet, a scholar, an administrator, a wanna-be mystic--always wrestling with the temptation to run away to join an intentional community--but would it be contemplative? social justice oriented? creative? in the mountains? in the inner city?--may as well stay planted and wrestle with these tensions and contradictions here, at the edge of America.